The ceiling was pink. A great glass bowl was hanging from it on a brass chain. At the foot of the bowl lay four dead flies, like a whole squadron of downed fighters in some terrible insect war. After I was done staring at the ceiling, I stared at the walls. They were the same shade of pink. Against one of the walls was a medical cabinet full of bottles and dressings. Beside it was a desk with a lamp where the nurses sometimes sat. On the opposite wall was a large photograph of Neuschwanstein Castle, the most famous of the three royal palaces built for Ludwig II of Bavaria. He was sometimes referred to as Mad King Ludwig, but since entering that hospital, I found I had a better understanding of him than most people. Not least because for a week or more I had been raving myself. On several occasions I had found myself locked in the topmost tower of that castle—the one with the weather vane and the eagle’s-eye view of fairyland. I’d even had visits from the Seven Dwarfs and an elephant with big ears. A pink one, of course.

None of this was at all surprising. Or so the nurses told me. I had pneumonia. I had pneumonia because my resistance to infection had been low on account of the beating I had taken and because I was a heavy smoker. It came on like a bad dose of flu and, for a while, that was what they thought I had. I remembered this because it seemed very ironic. Then it got worse. For around eight or nine days I had a temperature of 104, which must have been when I went to stay at Neuschwanstein. Since then my temperature had returned to near normal. I say near normal, but in view of what happened next I must have been anything but normal. That’s my excuse, anyway.

Another week passed, a long weekend in Kassel, with nothing at all happening and nothing to look at. Not even my nurses were diverting. They were solid, German housewives with husbands and children and double chins and powerful forearms and skin like orange peel and chests like pillows. In their stiff, white pinafores and caps they looked and behaved like they were armor-plated. Not that it would have made any difference if they’d been better-looking. I was as weak as a newborn. And it puts a brake on a man’s libido when the object of his attention is the one who fetches and carries and, presumably, empties his bedpan. Besides, all of my mental energy was reserved for thoughts that had nothing to do with love. Revenge was my abiding preoccupation. The only question was, revenge on whom?